Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  My eyes narrowed. “I’m sure. Baumgartner’s not exactly answering your calls anymore, is he?”

  He reacted. It was subtle, but his eyes flashed, just for a moment, before the practiced mask of the politician settled back in place. “You say that name with some respect, son,” he said. “Gordon Baumgartner was a damned good man and an American hero.”

  “Gordon Baumgartner was a mad-dog killer without a conscience,” I snarled, “and my one regret was that I only got to kill him once, and not before he murdered yet another friend of mine. He put too damned many in the ground as it was. That you used him the way you did tells me everything about you I need to know.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, son, it’s a dangerous world out there, and the country’s facing threats that don’t play by the old rules,” Van Damme snapped. “If we’re going to preserve the nation that we know and love, we’ve got to throw that rule book out. We’ve got to play the game as it is, not as we’d like it to be.” His eyes narrowed. “I knew Gordon Baumgartner well. He was a good man. If he killed so many of your friends, son, maybe you need to consider your choice of friends.”

  I saw red. Gritting my teeth, I stepped forward suddenly, and he actually flinched, just before my buttstock crashed into his teeth and laid him out on the floor.

  I leaned in and pressed my still-warm muzzle to his temple. “You should be damned glad that I’m not Baumgartner, you piece of shit,” I hissed, “because if I was, you’d be choking on your own guts right now.” I leaned on the rifle just enough to put a painful amount of pressure on his skull for a moment before straightening up.

  At that very moment, the entire lodge shook with a tremendous boom from outside. Everyone but us flinched toward the floor.

  I stared down at Van Damme, my face once again impassive. “That would be the blocking position,” I said conversationally. “I hope you weren’t too attached to your QRF.” I keyed my radio. “Geek, Hillbilly.”

  “We’re clear for now,” Eddie replied. “German was a bit…enthusiastic in applying the ‘P for Plenty’ principle. We’re going to have to go out by air, though; the road’s blocked.”

  “We’ve got a few minutes, at least,” I said over my shoulder. “Find Sokolov.”

  “That’s what you’re here for?” Van Damme said, though it was more of a mumble through his shattered front teeth. He laughed, a sick gurgle to the sound from the blood in his mouth. “Damn, but there’s a lot of demand for ole Dmitri. Well, you’re too late. He’s already working for us. The phone call’s already been made; things are already moving. In a few hours, the last of Concri’s bunch are going to be out of the picture, and we can start to rebuild.”

  I stared down at him for a moment, even as Alek hauled Dmitri Sokolov to his feet and pried the cell phone out of his hands.

  We had our targets, but our work, it seemed, was far from over. And now the clock was ticking.

  Chapter 32

  Presuming that time was so short as to be damned near nonexistent, the Group had moved quickly. We repaired to an abandoned Job Corps camp in the Cascades, with a shipping container lifted in to act as holding cell and interrogation room for Sokolov. The rest of the detainees from the meeting were being held nearby, in some of the camp’s Quonset huts, under continual guard. The really heavy security was reserved for Sokolov.

  The container was heavily insulated, making it nearly soundproof. There were no openings except for the swinging doors at one end; the other end had been welded shut. Sokolov’s cell only took up half the container; that way he couldn’t see daylight even when someone opened the outer doors. There was a small, two-way mirror just to the right of the heavy steel door that led into the cell.

  The cell itself was barely big enough to stand up in, and was completely lacking in amenities. There was a folding cot, a wag-bag toilet, and that was it. A single, naked LED light bulb hung from the ceiling, and never went out.

  I was already standing in the entryway, watching Sokolov through the two-way mirror, when Bates showed up. I was studying the little Russian, contemplating again how looks can be deceiving.

  Dmitri Sokolov didn’t look like an evil MGB mastermind of chaos. He didn’t look like the kind of guy that Spetsnaz hard-dicks would willingly answer to. He was a balding little shrimp, with a hangdog look to his face and a receding chin, with bags under his eyes that looked like they never went away.

  Fortunately, I’d learned not to judge a book by its cover a long, long time ago. Shrimp he might be, but he was calm and composed even in his confinement, never even sparing a glance at the mirror he had to know was two-way. He had exercised that morning, and while he might be small, his forearms were wiry and muscular. He had to be all whipcord sinew under his otherwise soft clothes.

  Bates nodded to me as he shut the container doors behind him. There wasn’t a lot of space in the “open” side of the container, either, as there was a table with several laptops for monitoring all the recording gear that the Group had crammed into the cell. Without any further comment, he entered Sokolov’s cell.

  He closed the door behind him, and the magnetic lock engaged with a loud click. He stepped over to the wall and leaned against it, his arms folded in front of his chest. “Hello, Dmitri,” he said.

  “Yevgeni,” Sokolov replied. His cold, expressionless eyes had followed Bates ever since the man had entered, though he hadn’t stirred or otherwise moved a muscle from where he sat on the edge of the cot. “Or is it Thomas? Or Emil?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bates answered smoothly. “Let’s talk about you.”

  Sokolov laughed dryly. “While I know who or what you are, Yevgeni,” he said, “did you really think that your mere presence would be enough to intimidate me into talking?”

  Bates just smiled that enigmatic little smile of his, that I had come find rather sinister. “My presence? Of course not. My stock in trade is information, not violence.” I almost snorted at that, having watched the man murder Damien Chu without batting an eye. His voice turned frosty. “Now, what I can do with that information is something else. Would you like to know how little Alyona is doing right now?”

  Sokolov just stared at him without a flicker of expression crossing his face. Finally, he said, “You expect me to place my family above my duty?”

  “Isn’t that what the Russian security services have been doing for the last two decades anyway?” Bates answered with a sudden chuckle. “Besides, you entered into a deal to conduct an extra-judicial killing for an extra-legal faction in the United States. It’s just regular, everyday crime, isn’t it? Doesn’t seem like ‘duty’ to me. How is that more important than your daughter?”

  For the first time, there might have been a flicker in Sokolov’s dead-looking eyes. Bates had just caught him in a mistake, and he knew it. But he said nothing.

  Bates pressed him. “Ah, but it’s not just a hit on Concri, is it?” he said. “You’re forgetting that I know you, Dmitri. Remember that delightful little interlude in Transnistria? I know what it is that you do. Van Damme and his cronies might have mistaken you for a thug for hire, but I know better.” He tilted his head to watch Sokolov. “We are going to find your people. I would, of course, prefer it if you simply told us where to look; I’m sure little Alyona would prefer it as well. Less grief for everyone.

  “But what I can’t figure out is why you felt the need to make a deal with Van Damme in the first place? Or Stavros, for that matter? It’s not as if you needed official cover; that’s not the way you work.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Unless there was something you needed operationally, something that needed some kind of semi-official cover to get into the country.” He shook his head pensively. “Weapons and explosives don’t fit; those are obtainable anywhere. I know for a fact that you could find belt-fed machineguns and RPGs in London. No, my money’s on personnel. Given the mess that is currently US Immigration, they must be men pretty high on somebody’s watch list, or in great enough numbers that they w
ould raise eyebrows coming in in the same place. Am I close?”

  But Sokolov didn’t reply. He just sat there on the cot at stared at Bates impassively.

  “All right, then, have it your way,” Bates said, pushing off the wall. “I’ll make sure your regards are passed along to Alyona, right after she finds out that she’s never going to see any of her family or loved ones ever again.”

  “We needed operational funding,” Sokolov said, his voice flat. “The project was becoming wider in scope and taking longer than anticipated. Both of the factions were willing to pay for support, especially as their direct action assets were whittled down. So, we made a deal. We do an operation for them, and further the Kremlin’s objectives in the process. Everyone wins.”

  “Particularly the Kremlin,” Bates said wryly.

  What might have been the ghost of a smile crossed Sokolov’s face, though it never came near his eyes. Then it faded. “There is a safe house in Silver Spring, outside Bethesda.” He rattled off an address. “The team will assemble there to strike at Concri’s house in Chevy Chase.” He looked up at Bates. “Are you satisfied?”

  “Of course, Dmitri,” Bates said. He turned and knocked on the door. I hit the release on the mag-lock, and he stepped out, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “What do you think?” he asked me.

  “I think he folded way to easily,” I replied.

  “He did,” he replied calmly. “The safe house will be an ambush. Probably a few small-fry brodyagi that the MGB no longer has any particular use for.”

  “Or an IED,” I said.

  He nodded. “Entirely possible. Maybe even both. The trick with Dmitri is hearing what he doesn’t say. You won’t get a straight answer out of him otherwise.”

  “And we don’t have enough time to break him,” I muttered.

  Bates shook his head. “There isn’t enough time to break Dmitri Sokolov, period, end of story,” he said. “No matter what you do, or what you threaten him with, he won’t crack. Even the threats to his daughter were play-acting; even if we could follow through on them, it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Totally committed, huh?” I said, glancing back through the two-way mirror. Sokolov was still sitting on the edge of his cot, his face blank.

  But Bates shook his head. “No, while the results are the same, that’s not what drives Dmitri. At heart, he’s still the brodyaga skullcracker that got recruited out of prison by Alexei Pushkin thirty years ago. While he hides it behind that flat Russian face, there is a deep vein of anger running through Dmitri, that shapes everything he does. He’d go to his grave spitting in your eye simply because you pissed him off by locking him up.”

  “So, what was the point of trying to interrogate him in the first place?” I asked.

  “While he is very good at what he does, and cunning in his own way,” Bates replied, “in many ways Dmitri is still a blunt instrument. I learned far more from what he didn’t say and how he tried to redirect me than I ever did from anything he said.”

  “The personnel thing?”

  He nodded. “The Russians have been steadily pouring gasoline on this little domestic firestorm, as much through information operations as through direct action,” he said. “I think they might be preparing to turn the pressure up again, especially since some of the worst of the fires seem to be dying down, with both factions having been hurt as badly as they have. I suspect that Dmitri has a direct-action unit coming in, and Van Damme’s people are supposed to get them through Customs without much scrutiny.”

  “So, how the hell are we supposed to find them?” I asked. “Van Damme’s not talking; he’s still under the misconception that we don’t dare hold him long.”

  “Hasn’t gotten used to the idea that he’ll never be a free man again, has he?” Bates mused. “War is hell.” He didn’t sound at all broken up about it. “Fortunately, as royally balled up as everything is these days, most passenger and cargo manifests are still filed, and mostly online. I’ll get some of my people looking into it. If I could borrow a few of yours, including your friend Derek? The more eyes on this, the faster we’ll be able to pin down where they’re coming in from.”

  “You’ve got ‘em,” I said. “Though Derek might not be much help; he just got out of another surgery.” Trying to repair a bullet-shattered femur is a long, painful, and tricky process. “The last thing we need is Alfa Group coming in under the radar to wreak havoc along with everything else.” I paused. “You think they’re actually going to take a crack at Concri, anyway?”

  “They might, just to be thorough,” he answered. Concri was the one “Sulla” bigshot who hadn’t shown up to Hawaii; apparently, he’d had to go in for minor heart surgery unexpectedly a few days before. He’d lucked out. “But if anything, he’s going to be a minor target.” He sighed. “This is bigger than the factions, bigger than Van Damme or Concri or any of the rest. It’s a game that’s been running at least since Andropov.” His voice got heavy and weary. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to head it off. But no matter how much I’ve done, and how deep I got, there are too many people with short memories and shorter vision, too willing to sell their souls for a short-term advantage.”

  It was the most human moment I’d really ever seen from the man. He had always been preternaturally composed; cold, calculating, and dangerous, in a cheerful, debonair sort of way.

  Something about the way he’d said it got the wheels turning in my own mind. “That’s why you came in from the cold, isn’t it?” I asked. “You got too close, and they figured out who you really are. Or at least enough of them suspected that you wound up on the MGB’s target deck.”

  He didn’t look at me, but he nodded. “I first started to think something was wrong when two of my most important contacts in Moscow went silent, about a year ago. Then I found out that they’d been snatched by the MGB on the same night, and were being held in Lefortovo Prison, without any public announcement of charges or accusations.

  “Since then, large chunks of my network within the Russian underworld started getting arrested or simply disappearing. Naturally, I was careful to make that network as redundant as possible, so they haven’t found all of my people, but the message was clear.”

  He turned to look me in the eye. “I am in similar straits with you and your company, Mr. Stone,” he said. “In the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin, ‘We must all hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.’”

  As I met his gaze, I thought about those words, along with what Stahl had said when Bates had first “come in from the cold” in that old factory in Martinsburg. And along the way, I was suddenly struck by how true-to-life our company name, “Praetorian,” might turn out to be, if things got bad enough.

  I hoped they didn’t. Even so, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t in for some serious disappointment.

  For the next day and a half, I really didn’t have much to do. We had reset; kit had been checked, mags reloaded, and everything was ready to launch for the next target. We just didn’t know what the target was going to be, yet. The Cicero Group, our own intel cell, and Bates’ network were all digging for something out of the ordinary, something that might indicate what Sokolov had made a deal with Van Damme for. Rumors were circulating in the makeshift team room we’d set up in the camp, ranging from the usual suspects, like IRGC Qods Force commandos to WMDs, to more exotic, even batshit insane stuff, like a geologic resonance weapon to make the Yellowstone supervolcano erupt. None of us knew, and most of the wilder speculation was more to pass the time than any sort of serious thought.

  The fact of the matter was, we had too much time to think, and we were trying to avoid doing more of it than we had to. We were all feeling the losses we’d taken in the last six to seven months, and Little Bob’s death had been harder than the rest, especially since the entire team had been there to see it happen, slowly and painfully. With little to do, the holes in the roster were achingly apparent, empty spaces where friends and comrades had
been.

  So, we worked out, cleaned weapons that didn’t need cleaning, read and re-read the few books and magazines we could scrounge, and bullshitted about anything and everything besides what was happening and what had happened.

  When the phone buzzed on the second day, I snatched it up as fast as I could. It was Mia.

  “Derek wants to talk to you,” she said as soon as I’d answered. “I just made the call myself so I could say hi.” I had to admit that it was good to hear her voice. We hadn’t had much time together since the flight out of South Dakota. And in my current state of mind, I couldn’t help but start wondering how much of our bond had been simply shock, reaction, and grief, looking for a bit of comfort in another person. That the same warmth and affection was still in her voice when she talked to me helped.

  “Hey, dude,” Derek croaked. He sounded like hell; I knew he’d probably been happily working his ass off in front of two or three computers while he was still in recovery from his latest surgery. “I’ve had a few dozen search bots out going through every cargo manifest, passenger manifest, flight plan, and dock schedule they can worm their way into. Had to get into a couple of secure databases to do it, too. Fortunately, there are still dumbasses with access who fall for phishing attacks. It might have gotten hard, otherwise.”

  “You find anything?” I asked. Every eye in the team room was on me, the half-dozen random conversations stilled.

  “I think so,” he replied. “There’s a freighter under Estonian registry, called the Narva, that’s been circling out at sea off the south coast of Greenland for the last two weeks. Ostensibly, they’ve been having engine troubles, but they started making a beeline for Boston two days ago. They’re just passing Newfoundland now.”

  “Have they got a cargo manifest?” I asked. That might be an indicator, if they didn’t.

  “Sure,” he replied, “everything’s aboveboard. If it is our target, I doubt the MGB would be so incompetent as to leave that detail out. But here’s the catch. They’ve already been cleared to dock and unload, without inspection. And the signature on the clearance belongs to Marsha Westing. It took some more digging to find out who she is; she’s from Senator Carlsen’s office.”